On Monday, November 3rd, at 7 p.m., join Darryl Pinckney at the Harvard Bookstore (1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA) for a pre-election discussion of his new book, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy, a reflection on a century and a half of black participation in US electoral politics. The event is co-sponsored by The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. For more information, visit the Harvard Book Store event page.

On Thursday, November 13th, at 6:30 p.m., Darryl Pinckney will give a talk about Blackballed at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore as a part of the Brown Lecture Series. The lecture will be in the Poe Room of the Central Library, located at 400 Cathedral Street. For more information visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s website.

On Saturday, November 1st, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., join author and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books Ian Buruma at the 25th Chicago Humanities Festival, where he will discuss his new collection of essays, Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War.

The event is part of the Bill and Penny Obenshain Program on Global Affairs. For more information and tickets, visit the Chicago Humanities Festival website.

On Saturday, November 1st, at 3 p.m., bring your kids to Labyrinth Books (122 Nassau Street, Princeton) for an afternoon with Caldecott Medal-winner Chris Raschka, who will talk about his latest book, Alphabetabum, published by The New York Review Children’s Collection. Children will have a chance to write their own poems, like those in Alphabetabum, with Raschka’s guidance.

For more details, check the Labyrinth Books website.

New York Review Books and The New York Review of Books will be at the Boston Book Festival this Saturday, October 25, from 10–5. Come visit us at booth #3, where we’ll have books at discounted prices, free copies of The New York Review of Books, and more.

From 1:30–2 p.m., join Caldecott Medal winner Chris Raschka at the Boston Book Festival’s Storytime, where he will read from his latest book, Alphabetabum: An Album of Rare Photographs and Medium Verses, at First Church Boston, 66 Marlborough Street. For more information, visit the Boston Book Festival website.

NYRB is pleased to announce that Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, edited and translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, additional translation by Matvei Yankelevich, is one of five books shortlisted for this year’s National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

The judges’ announcement is as follows:

“Vvedensky is a marvel: a poet too little known in Russia, and not known at all in the English-speaking world, is revealed as a major 20th-century world poet—wonderful, wonderfully strange, and haunting. The alchemical translation, with its shifty rhymes and non-rhymes, intense images and absent logic, knits and unknits reality before the reader’s eyes, walking not a line so much as a live wire.”

To see the rest of the shortlist, visit the ALTA website.

New York Review Books and The New York Review of Books will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, September 21, from 10–6. Come visit us at booths 428–429, where we’ll have books at discounted prices, free copies of the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, and more.

From 2–2:50 p.m., hear NYRB author and contributor Darryl Pinckney speak about African-American voting rights on the “Voting Rights from Reconstruction to Obama” Brooklyn Book Festival panel, along with University of Baltimore law professor F. Michael Higginbotham (Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America),The Nation contributing writer Ari Berman, and panel moderator Erika L. Wood, Associate Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Voting Rights and Civil Participation Project at New York Law School. The panel will be held in the Brooklyn Law School Moot Courtroom, 250 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn.

On Tuesday, October 16th, at 7pm, Ian Buruma will be at 192 Books to discuss his new essay collection, Theater of Cruelty. Theater of Cruelty brings together twenty-eight of Ian Buruma’s essays on, as he writes in the introduction, “our fearful fascination with power and cruelty and death” and the art that emerges from times of great violence and conflict.

For more information about the event, visit the 192 Books event page here or the NYRB event page here. We hope to see you there.